Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's New Attempt To Dominate Robotics
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Microsoft's Robotics Group is announcing new world domination plans — at least for the robotics world. The company is making its Robotics Developer Studio (RDS), which includes Microsoft's CCR and DSS runtime toolkit, available to anyone for free. Why make it a freebie? Because the company wants to expand its RDS base and get a grip on the robotics development space, hoping big things will come out of it."
I see a future where MS bots will only talk to other MS bots. I for one welcome our new wall-crashing overlords.
No it isn't, that's the way Microsoft has worked in the past and how they try to assimilate other markets. The same happened with Windows 95 - it got given away as a near freebie on all computers and even hardware components (hard drives would come preinstalled with Windows 95). The same happened with SQL Server - nobody was using it when they took it over from Sybase, they got people hooked by giving away a free version of it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
in championing .NET over J2EE he opined that 'we believe something is worth what you pay for it'. Guess that means their robotics dev kit is worthless now...
I think you sort of missed my point. COM, ActiveX and .NET as examples of the insane, overbloated, byzantine, crufty, heinous APIs that we can expect, and VisualStudio and SQL Server management tools as examples of the lame, bloated, convoluted, script-free, REPEATABILITY-free, non-portable (even between like systems) developer/management tools we can expect. In other words, kool-aid lock-in at its finest.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Nothing new here. They've been enabling botnets for *years*...